The garden she has made, and the meadow running down to an island in the river behind it, form a private and enchanted world. At the bridge, she waited to feed a widower swan perfectly matched with its reflection on the tranquil water. She didn't know, she said, which of two books she should be writing next. David Howard had enlisted in the Machine Gun Corps in 1914 aged 17, and survived four years on the western front. He told his daughter once that he had won his second military cross by peeing on a machine gun to cool it down so it could keep firing. Otherwise he never talked of his wartime experiences. She is the godmother of one child of the marriage, Tamasin Day Lewis, the cookery writer, who was also at one stage the girlfriend of Martin Amis. Laurie Lee took Howard to Spain to recover from an unhappy affair. What had his wife made of that? She wrote a book of short stories, Mr. Wrong (1975), and edited two anthologies, including The Lover's Companion (1978). [1] Autobiography and biographies [ edit ] Howard was hopelessly unfaithful, first with Peter Scott's half-brother. Within five years the marriage had become stranded in antarctic latitudes of distant courtesy. In 1947, she left Scott and their infant daughter Nicola to become a writer. She moved into a flat in a run-down 18th-century building off Baker Street: "I remember my first night there, a bare bulb in the ceiling, wooden floors full of malignant nails, the odour of decay that seeped through the wet paint smell and the unpleasant feeling that everything was dirty except my bedclothes. Above all I felt alone, and the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to write."

The Beautiful Visit. Jonathan Cape. 1950. ISBN 978-0-224-60977-7. Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys PrizeTwo large chub lurked under the wooden footbridge. She fed a widower swan which approached us very slowly up the narrow stream. She knew, of course, the bird's past history. The apple and willow trees that overhang the stream often hid the body of the swan in its journey, so we could only see the reflection float slowly towards us, upside down. Originally published in 1956, The Long View is Elizabeth Jane Howard's uncannily authentic portrait of one marriage and one woman. Written with exhilarating wit, it is a gut-wrenching account of the birth and death of a relationship. The painter Sargy Mann, a long-standing friend of Jane and Colin, also believes Kit's attitude did lasting damage. "There's a way in which maybe Jane's always looking for something unattainable. I suppose her mother's love, really." The arrangement was largely practical, but after Peter Scott remarried and Nicola went to live with her new stepmother, Josie Baird fell seriously ill with TB and Howard started visiting her in hospital.

Green Shades: An Anthology of Plants, Gardens and Gardeners. Pan Macmillan. 2021. ISBN 978-1529050738.He was a director of the family timber firm, although it would not be quite accurate to say that he or his brother actually worked there: "They were very established and well thought-of but they didn't know how to manage money," Howard says. I looked up, his face was lit with intention. He pushed the pencil into my hand and rubbed the slate carefully clean for my reply. I wrote, 'You very kind. Can't marry anybody must learn typing for the war.' He read it, and his face changed slowly, like the sun going in. He shrugged his shoulders very gently and wrote, 'Tuesday. 12s 6d don't get bombed.' The Chronicles were a family saga "about the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women." They follow three generations of a middle-class English family and draw strongly from Howard's own life and memories. [7] The first four volumes, The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, were published from 1990 to 1995. Howard wrote the fifth, All Change (2013), in one year; it was her final novel. Millions of copies of the Cazalet Chronicles were sold worldwide. [1] Publications: 12 novels, including 1950 The Beautiful Visit; '56 The Long View; '59 The Sea Change; '65 After Julius; '69 Something in Disguise, ('82 TV series); '72 Odd Girl Out; '82 Getting It Right; '90-95 The Cazalet Chronicles; '99 Falling. Also short stories, film scripts, television plays, and an autobiography, Slipstream (2002). a b c Wilson, Frances (30 December 2012). "Elizabeth Jane Howard: interview". The Telegraph . Retrieved 18 April 2014.

All the bohemian splendour revolved around Kingsley. "I think it was wonderful for everyone but Jane," says Sargy Mann. Howard found herself cooking and running a household of eight or more people and writing less and less. Time has sanctified Austen, though there are still those who don’t see what the fuss is about. It helps that she was a good girl, with the tact to die young; with nothing to say about her private life and her heart guarded from examination, critics had to look at her text. Modern women have less tidy careers. When Howard died in 2014, aged 90, the Daily Telegraph’s obituary described her as “well-known for the turbulence of her personal life”. Other “tributes” dwelled on her “failed” love affairs. In male writers, affairs testify to irrepressible virility, but in women they are taken to indicate flawed judgment. Cecil Day-Lewis, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Laurie Lee and Ken Tynan were among her conquests; though of course, the world thought they had conquered her. Divorces and breakups may damage the male writer, but the marks are read as battle scars. His overt actions may signal stupidity and lust, but the assumption is that at some covert level he acts to serve his art. A woman, it is assumed, does rash things because she can’t help it. She takes chances because she knows no better. She is judged and pitied, or judged and condemned. Judgments on her life contaminate judgments on her work. If she had purred, the room might have shaken. She was an impressive and powerful woman Slowly, the fairytale castle transformed, until the princess began to look like a witch, and the prince who had rescued her turned ogreish. Sargy Mann says, "I don't like admitting this but one of the reasons I wasn't more help to Jane was that I was too busy staying on the right side of Kingsley. You had to be sycophan tic around him. And if he was happy, it was great. It is very easy to give Kingsley a bad press because he was a sod in lots of ways, but he was also tremendously marvellous in lots of ways."For a long time, the household had the confidence and humorous liberality that gathers itself around a dynamic marriage," Martin Amis wrote in Experience. His meeting with the fancy woman had not been propitious: a couple of weeks after the family break-up, when the lovers were still living in a rented flat in Baker Street, he and his brother Philip had arrived at midnight. Cooper, Artemis ‘’Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence’’, London: John Murray (2016), p.260.